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Description #
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Step into the future of home automation with our comprehensive review of the Tapo Mini Smart Wi-Fi Plug P110M, specially designed for Australian households. Learn how this smart plug integrates seamlessly with Home Assistant and supports the Matter protocol, making it a perfect fit for any Australian smart home setup. We’ll showcase its energy monitoring capabilities, easy setup, and how it works with voice assistants like Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Apple Siri. Whether you’re in Sydney or elsewhere in Australia, discover how the Tapo Mini P110M can enhance your home’s efficiency and connectivity. Subscribe for more smart home tips and product reviews tailored for Australia!
Original Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yj2fQg_Rzw
Transcript #
Hey everybody, today I’ll be looking at the Tapo Mini Smart Wi-Fi Plug with energy monitoring, the Tapo P110M. This one has Matter support. This is actually my third Tapo smart plug, and my first Matter device, so I’m keen to check out Matter and see if I can get it working with Home Assistant. This one’s pretty cool because it also monitors energy usage, so you can track things like heaters. Let’s get it open and see what we’ve got.
In the box we have the warranty, a quick start guide and a Matter FAQ. There’s also a Matter QR code on the side — I don’t know if I should show that, so I’m not going to, but I assume I use that to pair everything. Let’s get started and plug it in. Okay, it’s plugged in, and it says I can use any Matter-enabled app to pair it, so I’ll try out a few apps and see if I can get this paired to my network without using the Tapo app.
I navigate to the Matter devices on my S22 Ultra and scan the QR code. It prompts us for what Matter app we want to use. I’m going to use Home Assistant, but you might want to use Google Home. It takes a little bit of time, but it connects to the device, sets up Matter credentials, and finally starts connecting the device to your Wi-Fi network. This actually took a few times. You want to be on the same network that you want the Matter device to be on, because that’s the one it’s going to join. And make sure it’s 2G not 5G — at least in this case, it couldn’t find my 5G access point.
All right, we’re all done, and now we’re going to add it to Home Assistant. Added — it’s loading, and there’s my Home Assistant, which I’m going to blur out again, and we’re going to see if we can find the device. Unfortunately the power usage is not here, so I’m going to have to add the device to Tapo anyway. But I can turn it on and off, so that’s good. I ended up adding it via Tapo too, and because it was already on the network, it was super duper easy.
However, now there’s a new interesting problem: the device shows up twice — once as a Matter device switch, and again as a switch via Tapo with the usage information. What I ended up doing is disabling the switch in Tapo and just using Matter for that, while keeping the statistics information coming from Tapo. So it’s a bit of both Matter and Tapo — not perfect, but it does a good job. There’s also a manual on/off if you want to use that.
So there you have it, that is the Tapo smart plug with Matter. Overall the Matter support is quite cool — I like that I can configure it without the Tapo app — but I am disappointed that some of the metrics aren’t showing up in Home Assistant. Maybe that can be fixed in the future; it is in beta after all. And it’s a little bit weird that the Tapo device is being detected as two separate devices, the Tapo instance and the Matter instance. Usually Home Assistant figures out that they’re the same thing, but there you go. Anyway, it’s pretty cool. It comes in at about 30 AUD. You can get it cheaper without Matter — the non-Matter one is only 20 bucks. I’ll see you in the next one, take care, bye.